Twitter Finally Lets You Share Team Accounts Without Sharing Passwords

If you’ve ever tried to share a Twitter account with your team, you probably already know it sucks.

You can share the password, but then you get that one guy who leaves the password on a post-it on his laptop lid and the account gets hacked. Or someone leaves, and now 15 people all need to learn the new password.

You can use a third-party solution, but then you’re trusting yet another third party to not go out of business, not get acquired and shut down, not go down during business hours, and, most notably, not be awful for its own reasons.

In the 10 years since Twitter’s launch, it’s never gotten around to building its own fix — until now.

Like a number of Twitter’s power-user-focused features, the new Team tool is built into TweetDeck as opposed to the more standard Twitter client.

Here’s how to start using it:

Download/update TweetDeck. The feature is rolling out today on the web/Chrome/Windows versions, leaving the Mac app out in the cold for now. (Going live without the Mac app being ready seems… not wise.)

Pick one account manager who knows the main password, which should now be secret to only them. If you’re already sharing your password with X dozens of teammates, you’ll need to change it or this is all mostly worthless.

Have the manager log into the account in TweetDeck, then have them…

Click “Accounts” in the navigation bar.

Tap your team’s account in the list

Add Team Members via the input box, then set their role. Contributors can tweet/retweet/delete tweets/follow and unfollow/etc. Admins can add/remove other users.

When someone leaves, have an admin remove them from the team list. Tada! No mass password change necessary.

One catch: all contributing users/admins must also be using TweetDeck.